Dec
21
What I’m doing on my Summer Holidays
Filed Under Spreadsheets, Wikis, Weblogs and Outliners | 1 Comment
At the end of November I parted company with Socialtext. I achieved more in my first two weeks there than the subsequent 8 months, and I never managed to find the arguments that would convince the company to fund the project properly. With a new CEO and VPE in place, Socialtext is moving in [...]
Feb
14
My work here is done
Filed Under Spreadsheets, Wikis, Weblogs and Outliners | 3 Comments
When we took over Ireland’s oldest ISP, almost 3 years ago, we hoped that we would be able to turn it around in 6-12 months. Unfortunately it was in much worse shape than we had been led to believe, and it took a lot longer than planned.
After several tumultuous years, the beast has been tamed, [...]
Jan
16
Wiki Gardening
Filed Under Wikis, Weblogs and Outliners | 1 Comment
Chris Dent, whose blog is a treasure trove of interesting thinking about wikis, asks:
Even if you have everyone writing in blogs every day, how do you ensure that all those stories are distilled for information that is useful tomorrow, next month, next year and five years down the road?
This is a great question, and one [...]
Dec
31
The wiki year
Filed Under Wikis, Weblogs and Outliners | 1 Comment
Although wikis have been around for quite a long time, each of the last few years has seen significant growth in awareness and usage, and also in money flow. 2006 has continued this trend: ‘wikipedia’ and ‘wiki’ both feature in Google’s Top 10 Searches of the year, Alexa shows Wikipedia rising to the 12th most [...]
Nov
15
Web 3.0 is made of people
Filed Under Wikis, Weblogs and Outliners | 4 Comments
John Markoff wrote in the NY Times earlier this week that Web 3.0 is coming. In some quarters he may as well have said that that sky was falling. The Web 2.0 moniker is still contentious in its own right, and enough scorn has already being poured on companies seeking investment for their Web 3.0 [...]
Sep
27
Wiki Comparison
Filed Under Wikis, Weblogs and Outliners | Leave a Comment
Open Source Classroom has an excellent in-depth examination of most of the main wiki options that I’ve seen in quite some time. The requirements are a little different from most (collaboration amongst 10 and 11 year old school children), but the differences aren’t really that different. It’s not just children who don’t want to learn [...]
Sep
23
More on Accounting Wikis
Filed Under Wikis, Weblogs and Outliners | 2 Comments
Karen has contributed some useful thoughts in response to my previous post about using Semantic Mediawiki as an accounting system.
One of the key things she highlights that I’d never really put my finger on before, is that traditionally recording financial information is a specialist skill - that of a bookkeeper. This made sense historically when [...]
Sep
22
Socialtext have just launched version 2.0 of their wiki product. I haven’t had a chance to actually play with it yet, but based on what I’ve read so far, and on watching the screencast of the new features, this is a phenomenal improvement over the previous version.
The original version too readily betrayed its roots [...]
Sep
21
Using a Wiki as an Accounting System
Filed Under Spreadsheets, Wikis, Weblogs and Outliners | 15 Comments
In the UK, the de facto accounting system for small business is SAGE. This is most unfortunate, as it is an appalling piece of software for many, many reasons. I can rant for hours on its many shortcomings, but today I’ll mention two of the biggest ones, and how we’ve been able [...]
Jun
12
I’ve recently added the Semantic Mediawiki extension to the Nigov wiki. This is a plugin that allows for the creation of semantic information within a wiki.
The basic principle is extremely simple. Rather than just creating a normal wiki link from one article to another, you annotate that link with information what sort of relationship it [...]